It’s the 17th of January and my “new year’s resolution” is already in tatters. My resolution was to go out jogging twice a week, and eat moderately healthy. Although I’ve been jogging regularly for about 2-3 months now, the arrival of winter had a negative impact on my routine. So, generally I thought it fairly easy keep this up. Then came new year, and everything was going great, until now. It’s been over a week now since I’ve done any sort of movement that I would consider “exercise”. The start of a new term at university, amongst other ventures had kept me too occupied to keep this up. And voila, my resolution was at an end. But how can I be hard on myself when pretty much everyone else had probably already broken their resolution or will do so within the next month. I thought to myself why does everyone make a new year’s resolution, knowing full well that they won’t last for long. I mean they’ve had the same resolution for the last 10 years and the maximum they’ve probably done is about 2 months.
The vast majority of the resolutions are based on changing a characteristic or a habit of the individual. Now, the thing about this is that it’s much harder than, say, changing your clothes, which takes only a few minutes; or even changing your hair, which may take a few days or weeks depending on the style you’re going for. But changing personality or a habit is deeper than the thickness of the skin, and that takes a long time. A person just can’t change from being a psychopath serial killer to a saint just as the clock tower rings the chime to announce that it’s midnight. Or a person can’t give up smoking or drugs, while getting drunk in a club in some basement that is a converted attic. as much as we love to think, people do not change in a minute that is between 11:59pm and 12:00am, no matter what the year may be. It is the simple nature of human beings.
This is where the idea of weaning comes in. Weaning is the progression of babies nutritional income from the mother’s milk to other food at the age of around 6 months. The reason behind this is that the infants digestive system is not developed enough to process other food, until that time. Further more, the introduction of various types of food is done slowly at a steady pace. This is known as weaning. Just like that a person has to adapt/wean in order to rid a habit or adhere to a new one. Your mind and body is so used to a routine, such as nicotine in cigarettes, that it takes a long period to live without it, or alter it. And so requires a gradual process of “weaning” before it can be stopped completely, otherwise you just relapse and you’re back to square one. In medicine, we are always taught to gradually increase/decrease the dose of a drug, rather than going to the highest abruptly, or stopping abruptly. We also see the effect of withdrawal symptoms in alcohol dependent individuals who abruptly end drinking alcohol. The human body is not usually accustomed to sudden changes. we also see that gradual changes lead to lower rates of relapse.
So really instead of a new years resolution, what we should be doing is a resolution where the change takes place over several weeks and months instead of a minute; let’s call it quarterly resolution, in which we have 3 months to gradually change ourselves. Furthermore,a person shouldn’t have to wait a year to make a change; “quarterly resolution” would be available on any day of the year, at any time of the day, and not just the very second in the hour strikes 12.
I agree that there are some things that can be changed overnight, such as setting up a direct debit to a charity and donating more. There are people with stone hard mentality and dedication who will be successful in any attempts, no matter the difficulty of the task at hand. But unfortunately most of us aren’t dedicated enough, or that our lives are too chaotic to keep an order, or that our new year resolution is something that simply cannot be dealt with overnight. So feel not like a failure if you, like me, couldn’t keep to your resolution.
happykidshappymom
February 2, 2012
What an interesting post. I once read that it takes 30 days to change a habit. And you are right — in the winter, everything is more of a challenge! I like how you compared habit changes to weaning — never thought about it that way. But it’s a good analogy.
Also simliar to when you need to introduce new pet food. I’ve never owned a dog, but when I had cats and had to change their food to a new brand, we always did it slowly. A little bit of the new food in with the old, until we had fully swapped. Looking at it that way would make resolutions a lot more doable.
Mahfooz
February 3, 2012
I didn’t know that dog/cat food had to changed like that, never really owned any pets. Guess we learn something every day
PS thank you for dropping by and commenting.